P4x says he has largely automated his attacks on North Korean systems, periodically running scripts that list which systems are still online and then launching exploit campaigns to knock them down. P4x says: “To me, this is like the size of a small to medium star, using the abbreviation for “penetration testing,” the kind of whitehat hack he has done in the past. to disclose vulnerabilities in a customer’s network. . “It’s interesting how easy it is to actually have some effect in it.”
Those relatively simple hacking methods worked immediately. Records from the uptime service Pingdom show that at some point during the P4x attack, almost every North Korean website went down. (Some of them stayed, like the news site Uriminzokkiri.com, which is based outside the country.) Junade Ali, a cybersecurity researcher who tracks North Korea’s internet, said he’s begun to take an interest. close what seems mysterious, on a large scale. The country’s internet attacks began two weeks ago and have since closely watched the attacks without knowing who carried out them.
Ali said he has seen the country’s vital routers break down at times, bringing with them access not only to the country’s websites but also to its email and any other internet-based services. . “When their router fails, literally, the data cannot be routed to North Korea,” Ali said, describing the result as “the fact that the entire network outage affects the country.” . (P4x notes that although his attacks sometimes disrupt all websites hosted in the country and access from abroad to any other internet services hosted there, they do not cut off North Koreans’ access abroad to the rest of the internet.)
It’s rare for a hacker with a unique nickname to cause power outages on that scale, but it’s still unclear what real impact the attacks have had on the North Korean government. Martyn Williams, a researcher with the Stimson Center’s North Korea-focused Project 38 North, said only a small fraction of North Koreans have access to internet-connected systems. The majority of residents are confined to the country’s disconnected intranet. Williams said the dozens of sites that P4x has repeatedly taken down are mostly used for propaganda purposes and other functions aimed at an international audience.
While taking down those sites would no doubt upset some regime officials, Williams pointed out that the hackers who targeted P4x last year – like most of the country’s hackers – – are almost certainly based in other countries, such as China. “I would say, if he’s chasing those people, he’s probably directing his attention in the wrong place,” Williams said. “But if he just wants to annoy North Korea, then he’s probably bothering.”
For his part, P4x said he would consider annoying the regime a success and that the majority of the country’s population lacking internet access was never his goal. “I definitely want to affect the people and the government as little as possible,” said P4x.
He admitted that his attacks were nothing more than “tear down government banners or destroy buildings,” as he put it. But he also said that his hacking so far has focused on testing and probing to find vulnerabilities. Now, according to him, he intends to actually try to hack into North Korean systems to steal information and share it with experts. At the same time, he hopes to recruit more hacktivists to his cause with a dark web he launched Monday called Project FUNK – i.e. “FU North Korea” – with hope to create more collective strength.
